Some deeper information on filters and how they are used?

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the scope and capabilities of filters. Let me list a simple (though powerful) example:

This app is able to provide workout advice (let's call it "Working out with Watson," just because that would be brilliant :) A general corpus has expert advice on training routines, exercises, optimal workout times, etc.

Now a healthy college-aged woman should obviously receive different advice than an elderly man who is overweight and smokes.

So presumably these things are the case:

I wouldn't need to put in the specific statements of which workout routine is associated which demographic, so long as the information exists in the system such that Watson can make the appropriate inferences.

While I wouldn't need to put the demographics information in the corpus, it would make life easier for the poor people that need to train the instance. So I would add filter metadata to explicitly connect the demographics to workouts.

Upon asking the question, I would pass in the demographic information as filter metadata.

Is this accurate?

Are there any more detailed documentation on the use of filters? (internally or externally?) Similarly, what is the state of documentation for app developers. Is this available, available on a "need to know" basis :), or just hasn't been created yet?

2 answers

Your example is valid. You could pass in demographic info as metadata with the question and ensure the answer comes from documents built and tagged for the specific demographic. You could have separate documents for each category of users.

For whatever reason my answer refuses to display. What I was trying to share is below. Looks like Chris answered your question though.

Hi again Garrett, the way I've seen our partners do it to date is by configuring the way questions are input into Watson. What you'll do is take user information you have within your application and use it to "enrich" questions that go into the Watson instance.

For example, if you know Age, Gender, Health Conditions, Preferences you could take base user questions and add that in.

example - "What should I do to work out?" -> (roughly) "What should I do to work out given that I'm 55, male, have bad a bad hip, asthma, and don't like running"